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“I wonder if Dawn would be interested.” I don’t think anybody else would have touched me with a bargepole, but it just seemed totally natural to do it with Dawn.’

      A phone call to an enthusiastic Dawn resulted in the pair heading off to their first ever audition at the Comic Strip’s home, the 200-seater Boulevard Theatre above the Raymond Revue Bar in Walker’s Court. (The Raymond Revue Bar was a popular Soho strip joint owned by Paul Raymond, the celebrated club owner and entrepreneur.) Undaunted by the louche surroundings, once up in the theatre the pair waited their turn, watching a man on stage juggling lobster pots.

      Then they were on, performing their old college sketch about the neurotic Americans. And, amazingly, they got in!

      ‘We weren’t very good,’ said Jennifer. ‘But they were desperate for women, to make it more politically correct, and we were the first living beings with boobs to come through the door.

      ‘I don’t know why it didn’t seem strange, working above a strip club, but it didn’t.

      ‘We got hired for the bum nights, which were Tuesday and Wednesday, when there were few people in the theatre. Sometimes we outnumbered the audience.

      ‘Such blind, blind panic. We just used to make anything up, silly stuff that made us laugh. I used to look through the crack in the door, praying nobody would be there.’

      Arnold Brown is a Scottish comedian who was working as a stand-up comic at The Comic Strip at that time. He witnessed the girls’ memorable first audition.

      ‘Their parody of American tourists in London was clever. It was funny, but it didn’t give any hint of how wonderful they were going to be in the future. It wasn’t a sensational sketch, but it was well written, very skillful.’

      Brown’s immediate enthusiasm for the girls’ double act led to him encouraging them to listen to tapes of the female double act of yesteryear, Gert and Daisy. Today, he remembers the youthful Jennifer as ‘quite an English rose, very good-looking, good bone structure. And there was obviously something special between the two girls that really connected.

      ‘They fitted into The Comic Strip perfectly; the boys at The Comic Strip were over the top, a very testosterone line-up. I fitted into it because I was a laid-back contrast to the boys. And they fitted in because it was nice to see two girls doing their stuff.’

      Today, we take female comic performers for granted, yet in 1980 they were a novelty: performers on the newly emerging cabaret/stand-up circuit were almost exclusively male. And overtly political stand-up comedy itself was relatively new too, though the arrival of a Tory government and Margaret Thatcher in 1979 was starting to be a strong focus for comedy. Although female performers such as Jenny Lecoat and Jenny Eclair (who went on to a successful career as a comedy writer) were poised to launch careers in the new comedy/cabaret circuit in the early 1980s, their early work involved a more ‘punk’ sensibility than Jennifer and Dawn, whose sketch-based comedy was essentially two women engaged in chatty dialogue, without any heavy emphasis on political issues or feminism and the war between the sexes.

      This difference proved to be helpful, too. ‘There were a lot of pro-feminist hard-hitting acts about. But we didn’t do that, which was to our advantage,’ recalled Jennifer.

      You can be at the right place at the right time, yet burgeoning creativity needs to be free-flowing and without limits. Because they had hardly any external direction and total freedom to experiment with their material and shape their sketches however they chose, the era was a wonderfully free outlet for their talents. Before long, they were on stage, performing their sketches, several nights a week.

      Jennifer has always had great affection for those early attempts at comedy.

      ‘I loved those days. No responsibilities. We went where we liked, stayed out as long as we wanted and if the audience didn’t laugh, we didn’t care. London itself just felt great – you had nothing to care about, no property, nothing. We didn’t think of it as a job, it was just a bit of fun.’

      The pair earned £5 each for an evening’s work. The act was quite basic: sometimes they would just find a prop and work around that, find something to do with it.

      ‘We had one sketch where we dressed like Thunderbirds puppets and one of us said: “What’s the time, Brains?” The other said: “Six o’clock, Mr Tracy.” That was it. God knows how anyone thought it was funny.’

      And so in this small theatre with its lingering haze of stale cigarette smoke, audiences who were often drunk – or had drifted in from outside as an antidote to being hassled on the street by overeager sex touts – the two women launched their careers in comedy.

      It was bottom-of-the-ladder, hit-and-miss stuff, still a tad daunting for an essentially shy person like Jennifer, who had only started to overcome her performer’s nerves during her time at Central, but it was a real beginning, an incredibly lucky break to be caught up in performing in something as radically new as The Comic Strip – which eventually proved to be unique in the history of British comedy. Their talents definitely didn’t develop overnight, but they couldn’t have found a better place to launch them.

      Dawn continued to teach by day, heading for the bright lights of Soho by night, enjoying the contrast between the two very different worlds while fervently hoping that no one from her school would rumble her other life.

      Initially, they tried to create a new sketch each night – until it dawned on them that the audience changed every night anyway so they had more time to produce different material, sometimes working on the scripts at Dawn’s studio in the school after hours.

      ‘We didn’t know anything about it really. Because we thought you had to change your costumes and material every night at first, by Saturday it got pretty bad,’ Jennifer remembered.

      Yet soon, as the girls began to also perform at The Comedy Store, another Soho strip joint hosting a popular late-night comedy venue that had started to attract a great deal of attention even before The Comic Strip’s launch as a venue, their shows in the two Soho venues, just a short walk apart from each other, kick-started a series of events that would transform everything.

      The Comedy Store, located in the Gargoyle Club in Soho’s Dean Street (and modelled on the successful, similarly named Comedy Store in Los Angeles), was a venue where new stand-up comedy acts performed each night. It had also been drawing the West End crowds, mostly thanks to the talents of a group of anarchic male comic performers, all young and very much poised to take Brit comedy by storm.

      At one point, not long before Jennifer and Dawn got their break at The Comic Strip, this male group had ‘defected’ from The Comedy Store and taken their talents to The Comic Strip, the brainchild of their unofficial gang leader Peter Richardson and a rival venue for their new type of anarchic, character-based comedy performance.

      In fact, both venues would eventually go down in comedy history as the birthplace of what came to be called ‘alternative comedy’: young, hip, aggressive, rude, sometimes political stand-up that eschewed the more traditional form of comedy, i.e. telling jokes, and came to be the comic motif of the times. It was usually angry, sometimes ranting, but it was also very, very funny.

      The names of these comic actors are essentially a roll call of Brit TV’s late twentieth-century laughtermeisters: driven by the talents of The Comic Strip’s founder, Peter Richardson – with star turn Alexei Sayle acting as compère or MC – the core Comic Strip performers were Ade Edmondson and Rik Mayall (who had formed a double act, 20th Century Coyote, during their days together at Manchester University) and Nigel Planer (one half of another double act with Peter Richardson called The Outer Limits), with occasional guest turns from performers such as Ben Elton, Keith Allen, Chris Langham and Robbie Coltrane.

      This was a comic potpourri like no other: a revolutionary group dubbed ‘alternative comedians’ at the time, but essentially the fast-rising generation of TV comic entertainers of the 1980s, riding a new wave of anarchic comedy that was about to sweep the country, first on stage and then on television. And Jennifer and Dawn were now working alongside

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